Home > Hey, Hey, Barack! What Do You Say? How Many Kids Have You Killed Today?

Hey, Hey, Barack! What Do You Say? How Many Kids Have You Killed Today?

January 27, 2013 - 2:07pm  lindorff

by:

Dave Lindorff

I personally found the president’s inaugural speech not just insipid, but disgusting. It reached its gut-churning nadir near the end where he said:

“We, the people, still believe that enduring security and lasting peace do not require perpetual war...We will show the courage to try and resolve our differences with other nations peacefully – not because we are naïve about the dangers we face, but because engagement can more durably lift suspicion and fear...And we must be a source of hope to the poor, the sick, the marginalized, the victims of prejudice – not out of mere charity, but because peace in our time requires the constant advance of those principles that our common creed describes: tolerance and opportunity; human dignity and justice.”

As he spoke these uplifting phrases, US factories were cranking out, under the terms of billion-dollar Pentagon contracts (in a small part of the staggering annual $1.6 trillion the US actually spends under Obama on its military[1]), fleets of drone aircraft that daily are raining explosives down on innocent men, women and children in countries that the US is not even at war with. Most of those drone attacks are personally approved by our Nobel Peace Laureate president, who has claimed the right -- unchallenged by either Congress or the Judiciary -- to order the liquidation of anyone he deems to be a terrorist (including American citizens), as well as those, even children, who happen to be in the vicinity of such a person. Of the 362 drone strikes in Pakistan to date, 310 were launched during the period Obama has been commander in chief.

The result of this policy of state terrorism has been a wretched, criminal slaughter of children -- a slaughter that has been hidden from view, and denied wholesale by the Pentagon and the president. Over 3000 people have been killed, the vast majority of them non-combatant "collateral damage" deaths. Over 172 of these have reportedly been children.

Noor Syed, 8-year-old Pakistani girl and one of Obama's first drone victims, murdered in a US drone attack in South Waziristan, Pakistan on Feb. 14, 2009.

To borrow from the president’s own style-book, "We the People" have been complicit in ignoring this wretched slaughter. "We the People," who cringe in horror at the slaying of 20 innocent first graders in Newtown, Connecticut, don’t spare a thought or a tear for the thousands of innocent children killed in our name by our “heroic” forces in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Libya, and elsewhere, by our Presidentially-targeted drone aircraft in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia, and by our weapons in the hands of allies and rebel fighters in places like Syria, Gaza, the West Bank of Palestine, Somalia, and elsewhere.

Just to try and make this monstrous crime by this president clear, here is a partial list, compiled by the organization DronesWatch[2], of children, some as young as 1 and 2 years old, who have been documented as killed by US drones (they are listed by name, age and sex in that order):